One of my coworkers said it had been described to her as “The Boring Bowl” and that phrase rattled around my head throughout The Golden Bowl, which reads at some points like Henry James’ novelistic challenge to himself to make the most lurid possible premise – a woman discovers her husband is cheating on her with her best friend / stepmother – as dry and actionless as possible. The Golden Bowl is, like a lot of Henry James’s novels, about the clash between the arcane and stately Old European World against the boorish and acquisitive New American World, but it is more about how much willful and pretended ignorance underlies society, no matter which side of the pond you’re on. It is a rich tapestry of every different shade of not knowing something: not knowing what’s going on, not knowing what’s going to happen, not knowing what someone else knows, not knowing what they don’t know, fearing what you don’t know, knowing what you don’t know, not knowing what you don’t know, which, to circle all the way back to the start, is not quite the same as not knowing what’s going on. Here’s a typical formulation of someone’s quest for knowledge, double refracted through two perspectives: “She had been aware, during the months, that he had been trying to find out, and had been seeking, above all, to avoid the appearance of any evasions of such a form of knowledge as might reach him, with violence or with a penetration more insidious, from any other source. Nothing, however, had reached him; nothing he could at all conveniently reckon with had disengaged itself for him…” James, being the exquisite stinker that he is, makes sure to put you, the reader, on the wrong side of the tapestry, providing a special kind of readerly experience: you can never quite tell what’s happening in the book about its’ characters not quite being able to tell what’s happening.
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